DEATH OF A BOOKCASE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Occasionally I’ve retired a bookcase, only to bring it back out of retirement. Over the past week, I diagnosed a bookcase with a fatal illness and…asked it to look at the little bunnies while I put a shotgun to the back of its head.
   That bookcase is now living splendidly on a lovely farm, far, far out in the countryside where, the farmer assures me, the bookcase frolics and gambols in a vast library. When it isn’t out in a field staring at more bunnies, of course.
   I’d been moving things around. There was an opporchancity to move a low set of drawers into an alcove-of-sorts. But. The space available was a few millimetres shy of being a useful space. Damn it. Was there a fix for this?
   Yes. Damn it. There was. Some space on one side. No space on the other side. Why not? Six bookcases in a huddle penned one bookcase in. If I moved two bookcases a few millimetres away, I’d be in business. But they were impossible to shift.
   Yet shift them I did. It’s an old song, this one. Find space on the floor. Move books off the shelves to the floor. Wrestle with the bookcase. Be damned sure you’ve moved it to the right position. Move books off the floor to the shelves.
   That’s the plan for moving a bookcase. To move two of these book storage devices, you must multiply the difficulty. The required floorspace balloons. You’ll need space for the books and space for the other books from that second shelf and you’ll require corridors of floorspace, ever-shrinking, in which to move yourself and the case you want to shift. Well. Damn.
   You might crave additional carpet to land on if you slip. Don’t slip.
   Luckily, the bookcases I wanted to move were back-to-back. Unload the front bookcase. Wrestle it out of its resting-place by five centimetres. That would be just enough. Go around the other side. Unload the rear bookcase. Push it into the gap. Now it doesn’t go a full five centimetres in…
   For reasons of stability, I have to shift this second bookcase sideways a little as it goes deeper into the musical arrangement of shelves. These bookcases are different. The first one is taller and has edges protruding from its rear. And the second one is utterly flat at the back.
   I’d like to nestle the shorter flatter bookcase inside the rear of the longer protruding back of the taller bookcase. But furniture is the cruellest month, to misquote the poem. And it is no go. My compromise squanders a centimetre. I’m down to four centimetres of the new-improved gap I am creating.
   That’s all out of the way. I’ve moved two bookcases to create a gap for this dying bookcase. It is against the wall, awaiting the firing-squad. I move it three centimetres. When it buts up against the shorter bookcase, the construction at the base of the case knocks away more space.
   I am three bookcases along in the shuffle, and I can just squeeze the low drawers into position and no more. But I knew that, going in. The picture runs like this. Bookcase in the corner against the left wall. Space for drawers. Dying bookcase against the rear wall. Shorter bookcase and taller bookcase to follow.
   Moving the dying bookcase allows me to address a problem. For a short time, the bookcase is free. I’ve moved the shorter one away, and I can see the dying bookcase clearly. Once upon a time, the bottom shelf – supported by pins – fell onto the books beneath at the very bottom of the bookcase.
   Nothing down there but paperbacks. The displaced shelf lay like the meat in a sandwich with a thick crusty loaf of bread to top and bottom. I saw some damage to the underside of the shelf, where the pins rested. Or, rather, where the shelf rested on the pins.
   Was that wear and tear on the edges of the board? I had a spare board, and popping that in seemed to do the trick. It only seemed to do the trick. Now, in the cold light of an electric bulb, I diagnosed the bookcase’s illness.
   The whole thing wasn’t the most heavily-laden bookcase in the room. And yet…
   This bookcase warped in the worst possible way: outwardly to the sides. The sides bowed out, disgracefully. Top, middle, and bottom, the thing was held in place by screws. But adjustable shelves are a boon and a bane in the same sharp intake of breath…
   Between the fixed middle shelf and the lower fixings down at floor-level, the side boards had slowly warped out. The adjustable shelf that fell…just fell out of place when the pins moved off to keep up with the warping boards.
   Had the bookcase been hemmed in to the left, the warping would have been minimal. But there was space to the left, which I hoped to fit the low drawers into. Ah, if only they’d been fixed in there, low down. I’d have had a useful buttress.
   For want of a few millimetres of clearance, a bookcase was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.
   Could I solve this case of the warped bookcase? I’d need to jam the bookcase between two other solid bookcases. Or I’d have to dismantle the case and flatten the boards under pressure and THEN reconstruct the whole thing AND THEN jam it tight between two other solid bookcases.
   It was too difficult to move out of there, with all the other things I was now moving around. I had to dismantle the bookcase in place. But not to fix. I just went to the finish. That was my conclusion. It had to go.
   And that’s when I started playing TETRIS with bookcases. Luckily, I wasn’t really losing any bookshelves. For unconnected reasons, I’d made another bookcase available. I tidied. And I organised. Out of nothing, I conjured my reserve bookcase…
   One day, I’d need that, as books slowly marched into the library. Well, damn, that idea flew out of the window and was gobbled up by a giant eagle. Books, sheltering from the raging storm, clambered aboard the lifeboat of a bookcase across the room.
   At least it was there.
   So I lost a bookcase. It died. When I killed it off. The warped boards were in a death-spiral. Circling the drain. On the way out. And there was a fair bit of wear and tear in other areas. You’ll find plenty of fixes for warped and sagging shelves out there. But if the main boards at the side are warped, you are on a long, slow, losing proposition. Better to take the lame horse around the back of the stables and feed it. Y’know. One last time. With a special meal fired out of a shotgun.
   I used an electric screwdriver. It’s considered humane.
   No, sadly, I couldn’t order spare parts for a board transplant. The very long game of musical shelves began. I moved a shorter and sturdier bookcase into position. And then, eventually, I saved space. I made it easier to get down into the left side of the library. And I made it easier to reach into the depths of the right side.
   Everything still fits on those shelves, and I even solved a few storage problems that threatened to leak into another room. So I won after the loss of a bookcase. Why did that one fail? I had a decade’s use out of it.
   And it wasn’t the bookcase with the heaviest load. There are another five bookcases of that type in the building. My suspicion is that one board was weak. And as it started to go, the board on the other side warped under that change.
   These boards were a long way from snapping. But they’d gone far enough to compromise the lower shelf. And that shelf had paperbacks on it. Heavy, in a gathering, but not that heavy.
   Now I must cast a wary eye on all the bookshelves of that construction. They seem okay. And they’ve all been moved around a lot. The failed bookcase stayed where it was through almost all of its life.
   There’s no single cause of failure, I guess. I gained greatly from the dismantling of a bookcase. But only thanks to the bookcase in reserve. In shifting my YouTube studio around, I made access easier. Now I’ve done that with the painting workshop and the library. It is less hazardous to walk into and through a room full of books, now.
  That was a long time coming, and it took the sight of a warped bookcase to spur me into action. How many bookcases have I retired? Several. They were all brought out of retirement. How many have I killed off? Counting this one, only five. I adopted one. Almost all show signs of wear, which is to say signs of use.
   The dead bookcase has donated spare shelves, if I ever need to replace damaged shelves in the other neuks and crannies of the library. Its memory lives on, as I keep the books in the same order on different shelves. Gone, but not forgotten. Rest in pieces. Can’t exactly say sadly missed. Would have wanted to go that way. Far easier than toppling over and killing me with a bookish head-butt.